The hospitality industry has always been competitive, but in a post-pandemic world, the competition is even steeper, as hotels attempt to prepare to capitalize on the next wave of eager travelers. Converting leads into customers has always been important, but now, in an industry that doesn’t know if — much less when — it will fully recover, every customer is crucial to survival.
Considering the economic damage in 2020, recovering, not growing, is the goal of nearly every business in the hospitality industry. And while it might not be easy, working with the right people and with the right tools, recovery — and even growth — is possible.
One of those tools is search engine optimization (SEO). In the long term, Investing in your SEO can help you overcome temporary setbacks, like the coronavirus pandemic. Improving your SEO while everyone else ramps down their marketing efforts will put you ahead of the competition in the SERPs once people start traveling again, and searches related to hotels begin to rebound.
SEO is the key to driving more organic traffic — visitors coming from search engines — to your website. Search engines, like Google, use specific criteria, called ranking factors, that account for your entire digital footprint — your website, social media accounts and more — to rank each of your website’s pages in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Why is this important? Because the top three results account for 75 percent of new business generated by users looking for products and services on Google. In fact, only 5 percent of users look past page one of Google search results.
To put it plainly, you want your pages to be on that first page. Better yet, you should aim to get your pages in the top three search results. But making that happen requires a thorough hotel SEO strategy, like the ones we execute for our clients every day.
The coronavirus has turned the already competitive hospitality industry into a dog-eat-dog business environment. But this isn’t the first time hotels have faced adversity. The rise of the sharing economy — and home-sharing services, in particular — posed a huge threat to hotels. Despite a few difficult years, the industry ultimately rebounded. Covid-19 is a very different scenario, but people will travel again. And when they do, they’ll need a place to stay, just like they always shave.
The best way to prepare for that pent-up demand is to get your digital marketing in order, and SEO is the perfect starting point. In fact, it’s the key to beating your competitors. While they wait for people to travel again, you can partner with a hospitality SEO agency and start working on improving your search rankings. That way, when it is safe to travel again, users will be seeing results for your website at the top of the SERPs instead of competitors’ sites.
When people hear the word “hotel” or “hospitality”, what’s the first thing you want them to think of? Your business, of course! The human brain is very persuasive, and if you can position your brand so it’s already known by consumers as the standard for hospitality, you’ve already won half the battle.
Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman says 95 percent of all purchasing decisions, including hotels, are made before consumers even start to find out about a product or service. Most purchasing decisions are subconscious, and SEO can help you get into the subconscious minds of your target audience.
When executed properly, SEO can build powerful brand awareness so you can begin rebuilding your business through organic search.
Mobile-readiness is a core part of our hotel SEO services. And, although every hotel SEO company claims to know how important mobile-readiness is to an SEO strategy, few truly understand how to properly leverage SEO for mobile.
Google uses mobile-first indexing, which means it looks at the mobile website’s content before the desktop site when determining rankings on SERPs, which makes mobile-readiness a great tool for drawing people to your site. However, your mobile site should also be used to drive conversions.
Mobile bookings account for 39 percent of Online Travel Agencies’ total business. That’s a huge increase compared with hotel chains and suppliers, which only capture 10 percent of their bookings via mobile. Not only that, but when customers need to make a last-minute booking, 70 percent use a mobile device to do it.
As you can see, there’s a huge opportunity to convert more mobile users into bookings from hotel websites, and a solid SEO strategy can help make it happen
This is a unique road map that considers every aspect of the business and its current digital footprint within the hospitality space.
Our results-driven services work to cultivate a quality SEO strategy that will not only drive more organic traffic to your site, but increase your bookings and take your business to the next level.
Our in-depth link building process and rigorous quality standards mean your links will be featured on the best pages of the most authoritative websites in the hotel industry and beyond.
